"It's given birth already? That fast?"
"That sea pig calf doesn't look small, either. It's pretty big."
"Must be about seventy centimeters long. That belly really could hold a lot."
Just then, the sea pig tilted her body slightly to one side, exposing one flipper, while the calf pressed close against her belly.
"Is she nursing it?"
"Is this something we should be watching? Go on, get moving. I'm hauling in my line. Don't get in my way."
He couldn't catch it anyway. Now that he had watched the whole process, Ye Yaodong needed to haul in his line. It had been down there a long time. This was his first time setting it, and he had no idea what he might bring up.
"We'll watch you haul in your catch. We've got nothing else to do anyway. We just hauled up a few more good ones ourselves, including two enormous eels weighing over ten jin each. Man, who knows how they got that big." As A-Zheng spoke, he rowed their boat aside so they wouldn't get in the way.
"How much did you catch on those five hundred hooks?"
"A little over a hundred jin. All sorts of things, just not as good as what we caught the last couple of days. Nothing especially valuable, but it's still decent. The weight's there, and they're taking the hooks pretty fast. We're rebaiting as we haul them in, then we'll make another pass later. We're not going home for lunch."
"Mm."
Ye Yaodong pulled up the anchor he had just thrown back into the sea, then began hauling in his line.
Before the fish even broke the surface, he could already see it clearly: a big, festive-looking red sea bream.
"A bright red start for good fortune! This red sea bream